The Eldon Street HSHAZ Project

The Eldon Street High Street Heritage Action Zone (HSHAZ) was a four-year partnership project between Barnsley Council and Historic England. Combining investment in buildings and shop fronts with community engagement and cultural events, the programme was designed to boost pride in place, connect communities and drive economic growth in places that need it the most.

Eldon Street in Barnsley (one of the towns most important historic high streets) was one of 68 Heritage Action Zone schemes across the country and one of only 9 in Yorkshire and the North East.

Gary Clarke Company worked with the HSHAZ to deliver a series of pop up performances in multiple locations on and around Eldon Street including The Lightbox, The Glassworks Square, Barnsley Interchange and Barnsley Markets. The trails were designed to take performance out of the theatre and onto the High Street, reaching audiences who wouldn’t otherwise engage and animating the town centre, ahead of two sell-out shows of Gary Clarke Company’s WASTELAND at Barnsley Civic.

The trails involved dancers from Gary Clarke Company, the WASTELAND Pit Men Singers and the world famous Carlton Main Frickley Colliery Band.

Following on from the success of the WASTELAND trails, Gary Clarke Company continued to work with the HSHAZ team and photographer James Mulkeen to create a series of striking images in which dancers from the company responded to the architecture of Eldon Street. This was a way of reframing and refocusing attention on the architecture of Eldon Street and connecting into the long history of performance on the street that has spanned more than 100 years.

The photographs were showcased in an exhibition at Experience Barnsley Museum in the Town Hall with an accompanying film which opened at the start of April 2023 and ran until the end of May 2024.